'Philippines Landscape' by Romeo Tabuena, 1953, Paris, Académie Chaumière, New York Art Students League, Sao Paulo Biennal

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A fine and delicate, watercolor landscape showing a view of the rural Philippines by this celebrated Philippine Modernist. Signed, lower … Read more A fine and delicate, watercolor landscape showing a view of the rural Philippines by this celebrated Philippine Modernist. Signed, lower right, in graphite, 'Romeo V Tabuena' for Romeo Villalva Tabuena (Filipino-Mexican, 1921 - 2015) and dated 1953.

Romeo Tabuena is a Philippine-born painter rooted in Eastern sensibility. He has been a resident of Mexico for more than four decades. Born in Lloilo in 1921, Tabuena studied architecture at the Mapua Institute of Technology and subsequently at the University of the Philippines where he majored majored in painting. He later studied in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and at New York's Art Students League

Tabuena decided to settle in Mexico and to make it the base of his painting career. But he maintained strong links with his native country through participation in major art projects, and despite his long residence in Mexico, retained his Philippine citizenship.

One of his most substantial works is the large mural, 'Filipiniana', commissioned by the Philippine government and installed at the Philippine Embassy in Washington D.C. Other exhibits include a ten-year retrospective show in 1959 at the Philippine Art Gallery in Manila. In 1962, his one-man show, sponsored by the Philippine Government at the International Salon of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, "further elevated the status of Philippine painting in the world of contemporary art". In 1965, he participated in the Eighth Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil as the official Filipino artist and art commissioner from the Philippines.
Tabuena held his second major one-man show in Manila in 1973, followed by a third in 1975 in Mexico City, and a retrospective at The Galerie Bleue in Manila in 1981.

As part of an official cultural agreement between Mexico and the Philippines, the Philippine Embassy, in a joint effort with the INBA, honored Tabuena with a Millennium Retrospective in 2000. See less